IST-Data Services Blog

Here’s what Michael Black, research and IT director of the Hearst Museum, said about it:

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick announcement, as fuller information should be upcoming in a campus press release.

Delphi 1.2 (the updated version of the Museum’s collections exploration and discovery tool) is now live and online.

In addition to the features released in version 1.1 two weeks ago — the ability to share sets with other people (whether or not they’re Delphi users), greatly improved ontologies (’concept trees’) for automatic object classification, vastly enlarged object data (thanks to the efforts of dedicated volunteers doing data entry on more than 140,000 objects), and the ability to view scans of catalog cards for the objects you find — Delphi 1.2 presents a couple of new user-oriented features.

Delphi 1.2 now fully supports user tagging of objects, including being able to search on either your own tags or across all tags submitted by the entire user community.  Starting with this release, the blue “tongue” will change the content it displays according to the experience level of the user.  For new users, a basic introductory text is displayed, while for more experienced users (here defined as those who have at least played around with the sets and/or tagging features), the displayed text is more of a “what’s new in Delphi” news item.

I invite you to try it out, to share it with family, friends, colleagues, etc.

http://pahma.berkeley.edu/delphi
Michael

On August 1, Project Bamboo launched a wiki-centric community design effort open to all comers. The structured activities laid out by Bamboo’s program staff aim to organize thousands of ideas and suggestions offered at four similarly-organized workshops in the months following the inception of Bamboo’s planning phase. Community design participants will synthesize the “Workshop One” artifacts (all available for review on the wiki) into a thematic overview of Arts and Humanities scholarship and a set of proposed directions for the Mellon-funded cyberinfrastructure project. Initial suggestions regarding consortial models appropriate to a Project Bamboo implementation phase are also being solicited on the project’s Planning Wiki, http://wikibamboo.uchicago.edu/display/BPUB/Home. The wiki, built on Atlassian’s Confluence platform, is viewable to the world, and anyone who wishes can create an account in order to join the community design effort. Participation in the wiki-focused work is one of four prerequisites for participation in the next face-to-face Project Bamboo workshop, currently scheduled for the week of October 13 on the west coast of the United States (more info at http://projectbamboo.org/join-us).

Earlier this year, a diverse committee of campus leaders met with representatives from Google and Microsoft to explore the Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Live@EDU service offerings and to determine if these vendors’ offerings in the areas of mail, calendaring, and web based file sharing are a reasonable alternative to UCB running these services locally (via the current CalMail, WebFiles, and CalAgenda services).

In addition to examining the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing campus messaging services, such as email and calendaring, to one of these vendors, the committee also explored their associated collaborative tools offerings, such as collaborative writing; social bookmarking; photo, audio, and video sharing; and mapping, which may also be of considerable campus interest.

The report from this committee (192KB PDF) is now available.

For this month’s Data Services news update, we highlight (1) the Berkeley Natural History Museum (BNHM) and IST Re-Architecting program and (2) the IST Collaborative Tools analysis project. 

BNHM-IST Re-Architecting Program

Based on the results of an extensive planning exercise between BNHM and IST last year (see http://bnhm.berkeley.edu/about/informatics.php), we have begun a re-architecting program of core BNHM informatics technologies to help support the next generation of IT enabled museum research, teaching, and public service.   In addition to enhancing core technology and support for the BNHM, this project is charged with outlining a more coordinated and sustainable system for managing, developing, and sharing our digital assets as part of the broader campus efforts to improve Research-IT management (see http://technology.berkeley.edu/critical5.html).

The re-architecting program is a year long effort, with the core focus from October 2006 - April 2007 on architecture defintion and implementation planning.  Because of the scope of the effort and the multiple partners involved from BNHM, IST, and campus, we have built a “Program” made up of “Projects,” each with teams, chair people, and project members.  Details of these projects and teams can be found in the program overview.

To help with overall program management, Data Services has brought Chris Hoffman on board in a 40% role through the spring to coordinate and faciliate program activites. Chris, who is currently IT Director for the Graduate Division, brings much experience with program management, architecture development, and academic collections to the project, and we are very glad to have his help with this important effort.

The next Data Services Brown Bag lunch, Thursday, November 30th in 370 Dwinelle, will feature presenations from a number of BNHM partners about biodiversity informatics, as well as an overview of the BNHM-IST Re-Architecting Program.  Please join us for this.

IST Collaborative Tools Project

The IST Collaborative Tools Team has released a report about the use of team collaboration suites in IST as part of a first phase effort to help OneIST determine what collaboration tools it shoud use in the future.  See below for details.

The IST team that carried out the project will be hosting an informal brown-bag lunch at noon on Monday, December 4 in room 200C of 2195 Hearst to discuss and answer any quesitons about this report.  All members of IST or OCIO are invitied.  We hope that you will join us for discussion of the report and what the next phase of project work look like.

Other Data Services Information in the News

The new Berkeley Computing and Communications newsletter has been released, and it includes several articles related to Data Services, including:

• Organizational changes at IST and the Office of the CIO
• IST Data Services
• Selected operational highlights, spring/summer 2006
• A roadmap for decision making: Data Warehouse Architecture
• New architecture groups in IST
• MIP’s business intelligence initiative named Laureate in Computerworld Honors Program

Some Updates on the Data Services News Blog

• We will now be publishing summary updates on this news site once a month, rather than every two weeks, in addition to other ad hoc posts.
• We have turned on the comments feature of the Data Services blog.  Please feel free to leave any comments or questions that you have about anything posted here–we’d love to hear from you.

For this second issue of the IST-Data Services news, we focus on our data warehousing services and the developing campus enterprise data warehouse initiative. We highlight three important accomplishments that took place in the last two weeks.

1. At the first DS Brown-Bag lunch (Oct 5th), Peter Cava (with Patrick McGrath, Max Michael, and Thom King) delivered a presentation on Data Warehousing 101 (a.k.a. Everything you ever wanted to know about Data Warehousing but were afraid to ask).

This brown bag session covered basic concepts in data warehousing, the current UC Berkeley data warehouse and business intelligence environment, goals for the future of the UC Berkeley Enterprise Data Warehouse, and a demonstration of the tools we use to aggregate (Informatica PowerCenter) and present data to data warehouse users (Hyperion BAIRS portal).

Many IST and campus colleagues attented (and our regrets that the room was not big enough for all who wanted to attend). Find the Powerpoint slides for this presentation at DW 101 slides (PDF).

2. Thom King, DS Data Architect, coordinated the publication of the architecture for the Enterprise Data Warehouse. This represents the second major milestone in the EDW Roadmap project, begun more than a year ago in partnership with the campus Data Stewardship Council.

See A roadmap for decision making: Data Warehouse Architecture and the EDW Architecture Package (Zipped PDF) document for more details, or contact Thomas King.

3. The first phase of the business intelligence (BI) tool review process was kicked off by DS in partnership with Business Administration. The business intelligence tool is an integral part of the data warehouse, and is used by the campus community to display data warehouse data. The objective of this review project is to select a BI tool that will be implemented in Fiscal 2008 as a replacement for the current Hyperion product. The core team for the project is now being assembled and many participants in different organizations across the campus and IST will act as contributors and reviewers throughout the project.

For more information, see the BI Scope Statement (Word document), the BI Platform Evaluation and Selection project plan (PDF), or contact Peter Cava.

The next IST-Data Services brown-bag lunch will feature an overview of informatics services, with a particular focus on the partnership between the Berkeley Natural History Museums and IST to develop the next generation of biodiversity informatic services. It will take place on Tuesday, October 24 at noon in the Grinnell Miller Library of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (in the Valley Life Sciences Building on campus). We hope to see you there.